Andreas Netzmann's weblog

I really was excited hearing about the new features of Apple Watch Series 2, but after some thinking I came to the conclusion that I am not going to buy it.

Performance, I am currently running watchOS 3 Beta on my original stainless steel Apple Watch. Since upgrading to watchOS 3 performance is fine and no longer unbearable.

GPS, when I go running, walking or biking I normally do have my iPhone with me, because I want to listen to podcasts or be able to take photos. Thus I have GPS tethered from the iPhone. The iOS 10 Activity app is showing GPS tracks for these workouts even with the original Apple Watch.

Waterproofing, I already wore my original Apple Watch while swimming and can’t complain about its waterproofing. Swim workouts are rare for me and do not justify spending that much money.

The looks, I really like my stainless steel Watch and would feel downgraded if I would “only” buy the aluminum Series 2. Also the Series 2 is about one millimeter thicker than the original one. Going from 10.5 to 11.4 is a 9% increase in thickness. I formerly was a slim line watch guy, adding another millimeter in thickness, is not what I want of a new Apple Watch.

So I will happily use my original Apple Watch with watchOS 3, keep my Milanese Loop and Nylon bands (royal blue/gold and black) probably add one of the new Nylon bands (Toasted Coffee/Caramel looks good) and wait what Series 3 might bring. I hope it will add a barometer to count flights of stairs and altitude for workouts like bike rides and mountain hiking.

Though having the extended brightness of the Series 2, is definitely one of my main desires for an Apple Watch update. Again, let’s wait and probably spend that money on a new iPhone, with a great camera, my other obsession 😉

It’s been almost four years since I bought my second Generation Apple TV, which I (still) really like for its capabilities, but there was one thing which annoyed me right from day one:
Flickr integration was very limited. It wasn’t even possible to log into your Flickr account and view your private photos, only pictures you were sharing publicly were available via Apple TV.

What a surprise last week when I turned on my Apple TV, there was a new Flickr icon and yes, it got a nice visual refresh, new features and finally the possibility to log in and view your private pictures with its latest update.

You can connect your Apple TV to your Flickr account by entering a code shown on your tv screen at flickr.com/appletv

Thanks Apple TV team (thanks Michael if you are reading this), thanks Flickr.
I am not sure how much I will actually use this feature since iCloud Photo Library is coming with iOS 8 this fall, but it’s good to see such a substantial improvement also in a long time Apple TV feature.

I am also waiting for an Apple TV SDK since my first WWDC in 2012. Maybe next year 😉

I really do like my Apple TV, it’s just amazing how capable this little gadget is. But it could do a lot more with little effort. There is one thing that really bugs me: You are not able to log in to your flickr account, which means you are not able to view any photos on flickr which are not publicly visible. Viewing my cloud-stored photos on the big screen was one of the main reasons why I bought an Apple TV.
The only official way to get this fixed is requesting Apple to enhance the new Apple TV. So please file enhancement requests using the online Apple TV Feedback form: http://www.apple.com/feedback/appletv.html if you also would like to view your private photos on flickr using your Apple TV (2G).

I spent almost half a day to find a solution to a problem I had developing a little Windows Mobile application at work. This app downloads a CAB file via HTTP to install it on the device. I am using HttpWebRequest and Response classes from the .NET Compact Framework to do the download and it worked fine as long as I downloaded the file from server in our company’s network. As soon as I tried to download the file from a server on the internet which requires to use our company’s web proxy I got WebExceptions (ServerProtocolViolation: “The response did not contain an end of entity mark.”) whenever the getResponse is called on the HttpWebRequest. Continue reading →

I just discovered a cool GPS track editing and planning tool for Mac OS X, it’s called TrailRunner (http://www.trailrunnerx.com). Have been playing with just for an hour trying to plan a hiking tour for 1st of May and are quite amazed how many features are included and how well it is designed.
It has integrated several online map services (Google, Openstreetmap, Bing, …) to show your tracks on road maps, terrain maps and satellite or aerial photos.

So far I was lucky not to need this function but suddenly this morning Safari on my iPhone 3 GS did not load any page anymore. Even stopping Safari going back to the homescreen and restarting Safari did not help. All other apps loading data from the net were working properly, only Safari was unable to load any data.
Looking for a solution to this problem without having to restart the iPhone, I found a blog post explaining how to kill apps on iPhone OS 3.0, it’s quite simple if you know how:
Press the standby/power button until the “switch off” slider appears.
Then hold the Home button until the homescreen comes up.
That’s it. If you restart Safari now you are back where you were before it started misbehaving.

Recently I was surprised that I have some screenshots of my iPhone in my photo gallery on the phone. Now I learned that it is really easy to take screenshots with your iPhone at any time:
Just hold the Home button pressed and then press the standby button. That’s it! The screenshot will be saved in your photo gallery immediately.
I added an example shot of the calculator on my 3GS, which I took just a few minutes ago.

There are some free apps on the Mac App Store nowadays, so there is no need anymore to manually create ringtones from music files in a multi step error prone process. I use iRingtones for this purpose.